Reading, Writing, and Mental Health

This past weekend I attended two very different, but very Alabama, events: the state book festival in Montgomery, Alabama, an all-day five-ring circus celebrating reading, writing, and publishing, and a memorial service on the grounds of Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa, the state mental hospital, locally referred to as “Bryce’s.” The book festival takes place over several blocks in Old Town Alabama, a grouping of historic buildings that reminds me of the Arkansas Territorial Restoration in Little Rock, Arkansas, where I had my first real job out of college, as a docent. Despite all the activity, everyone seems to slow down around old buildings, as though we are reminded that life is not all about rushing from place to place to place. I’m quite sure I saw fewer people on cell phones at the festival than I see on a daily basis around Tuscaloosa. On Sunday I drove down the long driveway of Bryce to the chapel, where I was happily surprised to see lots of cars parked all around the building; perhaps 150 people showed up for a ceremony commemorating and honoring the thousands of people who died while they were patients at the hospital, and dedicating a series of plaques that will stand at the old cemeteries where they were buried. The service opened and closed with a bagpiper, the haunting tones of the pipes filling me with a sense of melancholy and beauty simultaneously, somehow appropriate to where I was standing. Opened in 1861, inspired by Dorothea Dix’s efforts on behalf of the mentally ill, the historic grounds of the hospital will soon be purchased by the University of Alabama and a new, much smaller facility built. It’s the end of an era, and I was delighted to be able to tour the building in a group led by Bryce historian Steve Davis after the ceremony. As I walked the halls of the main building, I tried to imagine Sara Mayfield, journalist, novelist, sometime patient of Bryce, as she waited for her mother to take her shopping or walked to the dining room where she supplemented the meals with items she ordered each week from Sam Jackson’s grocery. Originally from Montgomery, Sara would have known the downtown streets I’d driven to the festival, might have visited her father, a state supreme court justice, at the state capitol on Goat Hill. And after 17 years at Bryce, she must’ve known all its hallways, its staircases, its grounds. If she were alive now, perhaps she would herself be reading at the book festival. Funny to think about.

Easter egg hunt

I was asked today by an acquaintance whether I had any plans for Easter, and when I said no there was a brief, awkward silence. In the South you are expected to have plans for Easter. I’m not even that thing some used to scoff at in my church-going childhood, a Christmas- and Easter-only attendee.
Yesterday I saw a poster for a local Easter egg hunt that got me thinking about how much I loved them as a child. In fact, I would go on an Easter egg hunt right this red-hot minute. First, the dyeing—getting the brightly colored boxes at the grocery store, poking out the holes to set the eggs into, boiling the eggs and letting them cool enough to handle, dropping the dullish-colored tablets into vinegar where they fizzed and bubbled, carefully dipping the eggs into the chosen color—sun yellow, lizard green, robin’s egg blue—with a little wire implement just for dipping, the bounteous feel of it. Then, waking up on Easter morning and going out in the dew-damp yard in pajamas and bare feet, holding your basket filled with wildly green artificial grass (its winter counterpart was silver “icicles” for the Christmas tree), and searching out the eggs that you had dyed and that your parents had cunningly hidden, after you were in bed, in the mailbox, a clump of grass, on top of a fence post, in the crook of a bush, at the base of a gutter-spout, on the stone wall in the back yard, at the base of an oak tree. Still glistening, the eggs were perfect in their oval blue- or green- or purpleness, drops of dew still on them, the ordinary egg become extraordinary jewel. Even though they’d counted and hidden the eggs themselves, it seemed one always escaped my parents remembering and our finding, to be happened upon much later and discarded, or—if judged soon enough not to cause food poisoning—peeled, sliced, and eaten with salt.
We’d get new dresses for Easter, and little bonnets when we were young, so that we were pastel and perfect like the eggs, and we wore white sandals that you could run in after church while the grownups stood talking. When the organ blazed and the full choir sang “Jesus Christ is risen today-ay, Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-lay-ay-loo-oo-ya,” it was exalting.
The world is waking up all around us here. When I went to the Dollar General store to buy envelopes, dog biscuits, and a hose nozzle yesterday, the man at the cash register and I discussed the nice weather and the possibility of rain for Easter. “I don’t mind,” he said. “Of course you might mind if you had an Easter egg hunt planned.” I agreed that rain was needed and even, mostly, welcomed this time of year, to bring everything back to life. Regeneration. “Yes,” he said. “Rebirth going on everywhere this time of year, isn’t there?”
Thanks, Dollar General guy, for Easter on a Wednesday afternoon.